Buy Nothing Day
If I had to give one easy piece of advice that will massively improve your cybsersecurity and that of the world, it is: Buy nothing this Black Friday!
This weekend is book-ended by two orgies of consumption, "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday". These events on the technological neo-pagan calendar replace "Thanksgiving".
This makes for some interesting social anthropology. As Roy Schestowitz notes this week on Techrights, Thanksgiving is an ancient festival related to harvest-festival and other seasonal celebrations that express gratitude for our blessings. By contrast, capitalist festivals express dissatisfaction with the world by indulging in futile attempts to "fix" unhappiness by buying more stuff we don't need with money we don't have.
I take some inspiration here from rehashing snippets from two older essays originally published on the much under-rated Cheapskate's Guide blog, about e-waste and hoarding. Both are symptoms of our copious over-production of electronics.
The first essay expressed my horror at understanding the implications of Waste Electronics and Electrical goods (WEE), a topic I was honoured to share in conversation with an early activist in this field Gerry McGovern and some members of my own family who've won science awards as experts in this area.